


Cemetery Polka

by sophiahelix



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: F/F, Post Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 21:12:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: “You know I have to keep moving,” Larissa says. “You know why.”Death smiles. “It doesn’t really make a difference, in the end.”“Well, it does to me,” Larissa says.They regard each other, for a long moment. Behind her large glasses, Larissa’s eyes are unblinking, but her clasped hands betray her, the fiddling of her thumbs against each other. She wets her lips, pursed and full and pink.Death is mortal, tonight.





	Cemetery Polka

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fontainebleau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/gifts).



> I’m delighted we share the same favorite characters! Rereading the series again (thanks for the opportunity to do so), I was surprised to remember that Thessaly is calling herself Larissa at the end, and so I’ve used that name here. I never read any of her spin-off works, however, so this is Gaiman canon only.

Dream got it wrong, as usual.

(She loves her brother, she does. All the more fiercely for his shortcomings. But he so often comes at things from the wrong end, making them more complicated than they really are. It's his nature, she supposes; to obfuscate, to fabricate, to veil. Even with things that are quite simple and obvious.)

Death doesn't really take on mortal form for just a single day each year. What's a day to the personification of the universal demise of the cosmos, or a year, for that matter. ( _Whose_ year? _Which_ day? She is present on planets so small that the sun sets almost before it rises, and on planets so large the lifeforms die before completing one solar orbit.) And she doesn't do it to understand the pain of loss, or as punishment to pay for her powers, or whatever else it is they say. (What's to punish, or to understand? Death merely is as she must be.)

Death takes mortal form not to die, but to _live_. To feel light in the dark.

(Not every year, but neither at her whim. There are prescribed times, and rules even for Death.)

The sun rises over her body this morning. She has limbs, many of them, stretched upon the colored salts of a vast plain. The sun is warm, and so is she, basking in the gentle heat of a dying red giant star, glowing crimson on the horizon. This world will be engulfed by its sun in a few millennia and Death will take countless lives, their unremarkable, singular sparks vanishing into the plush cold dark of her embrace.

Today the sun is warm, and Death rejoices in it.

She takes living form next in a great crystalline organism-city, far below the surface of a frozen ammonia sea. _We are we are we are_ proclaim her many shared minds with every gush of liquid through her gill cells, and all that she-they know is the glory of existence, each returning throb of shared and precious vitality. The cold, the sea, the tide of nutrients, tiny brief lives subsumed in the whole. Lives for a life, the ceaseless sacrifice of the lowly for the mighty, the mill driven on by the finest grist, both one and the same.

Death rests, after that. It's always an effort to be a part of that joyous, complicated symphony. To _be_ at all.

Not to be is easy. Not to think, not to worry, not to love or long or listen or look. The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks kept at bay, left in the province of the mortal. Death has a function, and she performs it well, scrupulously, to utter absorption. She has responsibilities, too.

But she is not as she once was. Eons have softened her, eased her, shaped her. She is a servant to and not a master of the living. She listens, at their beginnings and at their ends.

 _Welcome_ , she says, at the start of every life, each skein sent tumbling down a winding path, unraveling out of her sight. She is neither Destiny nor fate. She guides and she takes, her twin tasks, and all she knows is this, the art of their _execution_. She does it well.

Death is light now, where once she was heavy. The weight of her role is often no burden at all. She is herself.

And sometimes she is a green-leafed oak in a valley of many trees, singing the praises of the wind in the creak of their branches, and sometimes she is a small child in Ecuador, drinking warm goat’s milk while her father sings to his guitar before the fire in a dirt-floored room, and sometimes she is a king, mighty and feared and be-ringed, sleeping in a splendid palace the night before the revolution, just to know what it’s like.

And sometimes she’s a waitress at an all-night diner, the kind of place that serves fried potatoes six ways and coffee one, bringing a fresh pot to a truck driver who looks like he’s been in his corner booth so long his ass has fused with the plastic of the seat, and hash browns to scene kids strung out on something or other, and a glass of milk to a young woman with ancient eyes behind thick clear glass, working steadily through a salad and a steak, extra-rare.

Death’s not too sure about the steak, given how clean Kenny keeps the kitchen, but Larissa seems to be enjoying it.

“Can I get you anything else, honey?” Death asks. This mortal incarnation has a soft voice, roughened with smoke, and a soft, curving body, with warm brown eyes beneath heavy dark hair, and olive-skinned, capable hands. She’s tired, after a long shift, but something in her rejoices at the sensation, the stretch of muscles and the ache of joints, the whips and scorns of time. 

Larissa looks up. “Do I know you?”

“We’ve met once before,” Death says. “You probably doesn’t remember, but I've known you a long while.”

Above the rounded rims of her glasses, Larissa’s delicate brows furrow. “How long?”

“A little older than your teeth, and as old as your tongue.”

Larissa’s breath whistles between those teeth, small and white and sharp. One of Death’s molars aches, deep at the root. Probably the change in the weather, the rain threatening outside.

The table is scattered with books and papers, covered with tiny indecipherable writing. Larissa’s been seeking knowledge all her life, whenever Death looked in on her. Turning over stones in search of ants and secrets as a small child, slicing up snakes and chickens when she was a young woman, blood on those white teeth. Buried in books in the deepest catacombs of places she wasn't supposed to be, calling down the forces of the cosmos from the tops of mountains in storms. Ceaseless, busy, hunting, hungry.

“This isn’t my time,” Larissa says, hissing like a cornered cat. “I bargained with the ladies. Go away.”

“I’m not here for that,” Death says. “I’m here — “

Death never hesitates. Her function is cold and hard and unflinching, and she does it with the lightest of touches, with a smile. She makes it look easy. She executes.

“I’m here to ask about my brother,” she says, “because you knew him. Because with you, he was — “ She hesitates again. “Human.”

Larissa is regarding her, eyes huge and dispassionate as ever. “Your brother was a lot of things with me. I’m not sure that was one of them.”

Death looks over her shoulder. Her manager is on break, inhaling a cigarette out back against the peeling cement wall, bleeding warmth from the kitchen. She sits down on the other side of the booth.

God, it feels good to get off her feet.

“Our kind is different,” she says, quietly. “We have preferences, dislikes, personalities. Habits. We don’t have _lives_. Morpheus — did.”

“Hmmph,” Larissa says. She looks down and presses a finger against an index card, drawing it back and forth across the table. Her fingernail is short and clean. “Well. If he had a personality, I didn’t see much of it. Plenty of dislikes.”

“Please,” Death asks. 

Larissa shuts her eyes. “He used to kiss me between my brows. He wanted to hear me thinking. Not my thoughts, just the sound of me _thinking_. “

Death holds her breath, mortal, trapped inside her chest like a living thing, and then nods, exhaling, setting it free. “Yes,” she says. “That sounds like him.”

Larissa opens her eyes, clear as ever. “And he was arrogant and pig-headed and _so_ foolish and set in his ways. I felt as though he was loving me from a distance of centuries, in some forgotten form of courtship. Honestly, even _I’ve_ kept up with the times.”

“Yes,” Death says slowly, and Larissa narrows her eyes.

“You know I have to keep moving,” Larissa says. “You know why.”

Death smiles. “It doesn’t really make a difference, in the end.”

“Well, it does to me,” Larissa says. 

They regard each other, for a long moment. Behind her large glasses, Larissa’s gaze is unblinking, but her clasped hands betray her, the fiddling of her thumbs against each other. She wets her lips, pursed and full and pink.

Death is mortal, tonight. 

Over the eons, she’s known love. Even in these brief instants of life, there’s been the touch of a grandmother’s hand or the nuzzle of a faithful dog, the all-encompassing joy of communal existence. She’s known pleasure, too, in many forms; the opposing side of pain, making up the spectrum of existence. She’s subject to all her siblings’ powers and influences in mortal form, and perhaps in truth that’s why she takes it. To know what it’s like to belong to them, for a little while.

Now it’s Desire whose realm she enters, conscious and unresisting. In this body it feels like heat and ache, like slickness and hunger, so aware of the woman on the other side of the table. Aware of being wanted back, even in just this passing moment, two beings drawn together by something more than what they share, a finished past and an inevitable future.

Death clears her throat. “My shift ends in ten.”

Outside, Larissa pushes up her glasses and says, “I’m not good at driving, it just won’t _take_ ,” and so Death drives them home, hands steady on the wheel of her ancient pickup truck. Larissa’s apartment is small and anonymous, like all the others on her floor, and like all the others it hides secrets inside, a life as unremarkable and singular as anyone else’s.

Books. Knives. Socks. Eyeballs. A small trunk full of vapid, smiling, silk-dressed porcelain dolls.

“For curses,” Larissa says, matter of factly, but there’s tenderness in her face and hands as she shuts the lid.

In the bedroom, she undresses before Death can touch her. White undershirt, white briefs, pale skin. Beneath the cotton her nipples are dark, rising in the chill of the unheated air. Outside, the rain is starting, an uneven rattle against the window, and Larissa folds her clothes and puts them on the chair.

Death draws closer. She’s a little taller, enough to press her lips against Larissa’s forehead, hands on her shoulders. Larissa lets out a sigh, relaxing against her.

“You’re warm,” Larissa says. There’s a little catch in her voice. “I always thought — “

“I'm not him,” Death says, and she isn't, in so many ways that matter. She takes Larissa’s hands and puts them on her hips, letting her feel the heat of this body, the solid form she’s taken tonight. Tilting her head, she whispers a name in Larissa’s ear, one from thousands of years past. The way she did at the beginning. Larissa won't remember that, but still she lets out a sharp murmur, holding tighter, and leans up to kiss Death fiercely.

Death gentles her with hands and lips, and lets Larissa take her to bed. Their lovemaking is like breaking waves, rippling and crashing over them in turn, warm and salt and changeable. She makes Larissa cry out as though she wanted to call a name, but Larissa only grips Death’s dark hair, holding her close. Larissa’s touch is vicious and precise at first, then frantic, loving, passionate, lost in hungry kisses as her hand moves desperately between them. They are alive, together, and tonight Death understands Larissa and the others like her, the burning flame of their desire to stay this way. It’s so good, the sting of teeth and the press of thigh, to fight back the night and the rain, heart pounding and blood singing, _I am I am I am_.

The fire recedes, gradual, cooling. Larissa lies on her back, chest heaving with her breaths, hair tangled on the pillow. The rain is quieting too, gentle on the pavement below.

“Now I know,” Larissa says.

Death smiles, curled on her side, arm beneath her head. She reaches out, running a finger along the line of Larissa’s slight shoulder. “Yes?”

“Why they call it the little death,” Larissa says, and breaks into a laugh, deep and rusty, as if she hasn't used it in a long time.

“What is it?” Death asks, fondly.

“Nothing,” Larissa says. She blinks, owlish without her glasses, and shakes her head. “I made a joke. My first,” she adds, and smiles, like a light in the dark.


End file.
